Showing posts with label The National Gallery of Art of Washington D.C.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The National Gallery of Art of Washington D.C.. Show all posts

14/03/2014

An American Adventure


“In the pantheon of modern styles, Expressionism is – after realism – the most conservative. It is the least adventurous in the pure inventions of mind, the most hesitant to tear asunder the basic constituents of traditional easel painting, the most eager to reform rather than to revolutionize what it inherits from the past. Yet it is the most fastidious in sustaining – even, it might be said, in celebrating – the momentum of raw emotion in the picture-making process. Thus Expressionism aspires to a pictorial ethos to which Expressionist priorities of feeling inhibit easy access.”             
Hilton Kramer, The Age of The Avant-Garde, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1973, P. 230.

Shortly after buying paintings from me, Jeff invited us over to New Jersey. I had decided to wait at least until the end of Christmas. Since Carol had to be in NCAD for her assessment and most of the spring would see her consumed with work for her graduation, we decided to go over in mid January - despite the winter snows that would await us. Since my mother’s death in January 2009, I had only left the house to go to the shops, visit exhibitions and buy art materials or occasionally to go to dinner with my brother and sister. So the thought of leaving my house for ten days terrified me. I dreaded coming come to find my house burnt down and my life’s work gone! I feared travelling in a plane and coping in New York. However, my greatest worry was leaving our dog Lucy behind. She was usually by our side all the time so we hated the thought of leaving her alone. We worried about our cats too, but as long as they were fed, we thought they would be ok. Luckily, we managed to find an excellent pet minder, who agreed to call to my house twice a day, walk Lucy, feed, and spend time with our pets. However, while Lucy and our cat Scrapper were fine, Casey our other cat and mother of Scrapper was distraught by my disappearance and hid from the pet-minder.                                              
                                                      
First thing on Tuesday 18th January, we flew out of Dublin after being all but probed by immigration. I had been to America three times before in my youth, but for Carol it was her first transatlantic flight. When we landed, Jeff met us at the arrivals lounge. Although we had emailed and skyped, this was our first meeting in the flesh - so we were delighted by Jeff’s boundless generosity and warm companionship. We arrived to find snow everywhere and piled high by snowploughs. As it turned out, January was to have some of the worst snowstorms in recorded history in New Jersey and New York. Nevertheless, we were impressed with how quickly the authorities cleared the main roads of snow compared to Dublin - though Jeff told us that New Yorkers had complained that the mayor had still not done enough.                                                                                                                                             
Jeff drove us to New Jersey and we put our bags away and freshened up. We had wanted to have a quick nap - but neither of us could sleep with excitement. Jeff took us to a local Freeway store where we stocked up on American sweets, crisps, cakes and cookies. We must have looked like two stoners as we went around the store eyeing up the huge variety of junk food. Then Jeff took us to Pearl Paint in Paramus. It was a warehouse-sized store off the highway. I had never seen such a big art store in my life and I did not know where to look first. I bought Sennelier and M. Graham & Co. oil paints, Chinese calligraphy brushes, Sharpie markers and coloured pencils. Then we went to the Westfield Mall where Carol was able to buy Hello Kitty toys in the Sanrio store and buy jewellery in Hot Topic. Later we went for dinner with Jeff at Joe’s restaurant in the mall.                                                                            
                 
When we got back to our hotel room, we unpacked and watched American television. Carol and I loved the reality shows, commercials and local news channels. However, the best thing on TV for me was the boxing on ESPN Classic which Carol lament went on all night! Both of us loved American TV and found it a welcome relief from the avalanche of bad news on Irish television. America was going through its own recession, a vicious battle between the right and left and the public sector and the private sector - but as a tourist, I did not understand the subtleties of the political arguments that were raging and besides Ireland’s situation was far worse and closer to my heart. In the past few years, I had already gone through shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining, depression and resignation both economically and existentially. Until thanks to Jeff’s kindness and support, I had found some hope - even if sadly it had come at a time so bad for others.                                                       
                                   
The following day we went into Manhattan with Jeff. On our way, we stopped briefly at Fort Lee, and Jeff showed us the view across the Hudson River to Manhattan. Jeff told us how George Washington had positioned his forces along the palisades to control the Hudson, how the English had tried to surprise attack his troops and encircle them - and how Washington had staged a tactical retreat just in time to save his forces and live to fight another day.                                           
                                                     
Our first stop in Manhattan was to MoMA the “St. Peter’s of Modern Art” as I joked to Jeff. The crowd in MoMA were hip and cool - a pleasant mix of art students, artists, art lovers, families and elderly New Yorkers. It also had many stunning looking arty girls and cool looking arty boys. It had a vibrant celebratory feel - everyone seemed crazy about art.                          
                                                   
In MoMA, we saw a revelatory exhibition of Abstract Expressionists, which included masterpieces by Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Still, Kline and Newman. The Pollock’s and de Kooning’s, which I had pored over in books since a child, most impressed me. I felt like a parched man stumbling out of a desert to find and stand under a waterfall. Before seeing the show, I had read Lance Laupind, who had said, Mitchell, who, for my money, is better than Pollock, feels literally pushed aside.” (‘A Retrospective's Tale of Two Cities’, Lance Esplund, The Wall Street Journal,  29th December 2010.) Jeff and I wondered what planet he was living on. Even if you put aside the issue of originality - where she would lose to both Pollock and de Kooning - her paintings were unresolved messes.                                           
            
Pollock made all the other painters apart from de Kooning and Rothko look like students - their work studied, schooled, theorized. Pollock’s work in comparison was molten, intense, volcanic and unruly. He broke all the rules and yet managed to make it work. His pencil drawings of flame like figures showed a surprising subtlety, softness and intense slow build up of shaded colour. Yet his work looked pointless in postcards – they demanded to be experienced in the full scale of their reality.      
                              
The Ab-Ex’s sense of scale was radical, their bold designs on large canvases were echoes of the grandeur of American landscape painting of the 19th century. American art in their hands was not just large it was epic. Almost every Pollock in the show was a one-off masterpiece – a radical experimentation. That is why he suffered such an artistic block in later years - he simply could not fake it or pastiche himself.                                                                                                                               
Rothko’s stained and scumbled colour was elegiac in its intensity. His work seemed to me to stand alone in its tragic minimal drama. Only Barnet Newman’s work seemed to bare any kinship with Rothko, but his work totally lacked Rothko’s depth of feeling and ambition.                                         

If Pollock represented a maximalist approach to abstraction then Ad Reinhardt represented a minimalist one. Where Pollock had tried to push painting to its expressive extreme - Reinhardt tried to show in his ‘black’ paintings how even the most subtle shifts in hue and tone from pitch black to violet black to mauve black could induce aesthetic awareness and questioning. If Pollock art was Dionysian, Reinhardt’s was Zen – a painted equivalent of John Cage’s composition 4`33, where silence is never just silence there is always ambient sound.                                                                                   
           
Most of the contemporary art I saw in MoMA was instantly forgettable, Nan Goldin’s work disappointed me and next to Cindy Sherman she was blown-away. There was a huge Rauschenberg print of newspaper pages but it struck me a big so-what. There was a bale of hay, with a golden needle and thread wrapped around it - so what. There were smart arsed paintings, and smart arsed video pieces and smart arsed sculptures. My time was short in New York never mind on this earth so I passed them by not even caring to read the helpful in-depth explanations. I saw an Elizabeth Murray painted shaped canvas, and wondered in rage, at how Robert Hughes and others, could rate her so highly - and Julian Schnabel so poorly.                                                                                                                             
             
Ed Ruscha left me cold. Although I could see how he provided a link between Pop art and language based conceptualism - his canvases felt empty and smart arsed - and as paintings facile and just about competent. James Rosenquist’s paintings clearly influenced David Salle as well as Jeff Koons, yet while they were technically skilled and often lush they suggested a new kind of academicism to me.                  
Ellen Gallagher’s multi page mixed-media piece was stunning. Even a conservative art lover would have to acknowledge her craftsmanship, attention to detail, formal inventiveness and material sophistication. Her use of plasticine, glitter, collage, print and paint to comment on black fashion magazines and their attempts to promote white western standards of beauty to black women was poetic, thought provoking and sorrowful.                                                            
                                        
After looking around MoMA Jeff left to do some business. We went into the American Museum of Folk Art a slender building next-door, which seemed like an afterthought to MoMA It was a bit of a disappointment. I thought IMMA in Dublin had a far superior collection of Outsider Art. I found most of the Folk art quaint and almost comical after the intensity and strength of the MoMA collection. There was an exhibition of American quilts – that neither Carol nor I had any interest in. My favourite works in the American Folk Art Museum were Henry Darger’s watercolours and source material, and the tender pin-up shots of his wife by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. However, I found Von Bruenchenhein’s acid-trip like abstract paintings and chicken-bone sculptures just goofy. In the cafe, I ordered a cappuccino and was presented with the largest cappuccino I had ever had. “It’s as big as a soup bowl!” I exclaimed. Even the waiter laughed at that.                                                                                                            

With still some time to spare until Jeff picked us up, we went into the MoMA bookshop. It was one of the best art bookshops I had ever seen. It was cool and funky and it was obvious a lot of care and thought had gone into its design to make it at once fun, functional, and highbrow - yet light-hearted and entertaining. It was superbly stocked with Modern and Contemporary art books, as well as countless gadgets and souvenirs. I bought a book on Lovis Corinth another on Jean-Michel Basquiat and a DVD of an interview between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Paul Tschinkel made in 1983, as well as a huge catalogue from ‘The Eighties Revisited from the Bischofberger Collection’ an exhibition that had recently been staged in the Kunsthalle Bielefeld the previous year. New York was a shopper’s paradise, even for a specialized shopper like me. I am not usually materialistic, but in New York I saw so many art books, paints and art related nick-knacks that I could have turned my whole house into an entirely art related den.                               

I found it quiet a culture shock to come from provincial Dublin to the busting metropolis of New York. The largeness of life in America was astounding, as was the energy of New York and its vertical scale. It was my first trip to an English speaking country since London in 1997, yet I came to understand the expression “two nations divided by a common language” and I often found it hard to adjust to American expressions and local trivia. Apart from art, my other great passion in the U.S. was junk food, which I adored - eating more in ten days than I had in months. Yet to my disappointment, when I returned home and weighed myself, I only put on a couple of pounds but they went straight to my stomach!                                                                                                 
                                          
Jeff collected us outside MoMA and we met up with his wife Rita. Before going for a meal, they brought us to Target in Fort Lee. Again, Carol and I were filled with childish wonder at a megastore with so much to choose from. We had dinner in Outback a restaurant in Fort Lee. I ordered a small steak, but as I tried to swallow my first bite - it lodged in my throat. I struggled to cough it up, but I did not want to be rude and spit it out in front of everyone - so it remained stuck as everyone looked at me with mounting concern. I had visions of myself dying in New York just as I had my first success in years. Nevertheless, I managed to cough up the steak - and had to spit it out.                      
                                


On Thursday, Jeff again drove us into Manhattan to go to the Whitney Museum. I disliked the entrance to the Whitney, which reminded me of a Cold War bunker. However, the galleries themselves were pleasant enough. First, we saw a group exhibition called Modern Life. Edward Hopper and His Time. The Hopper exhibition was a surprising delight. I had only ever seen a few individual Hopper’s in other museums, so to see so many of his oil paintings, watercolours and prints was a revelation. It only served to increase my esteem for him tenfold. In reproduction, I had feared his work was too illustrative and indebted to the example of photography. A situation not helped by his numerous lowbrow imitators who lacked his drawing and painting gifts and eye for the poetry of modern life. Yet in reality, Hopper’s work was much more painterly than I had expected. He used unusual colour combinations - underpinned by rigorous drawing and an original sense of design. In fact, his work was far more cinematic than photographic.                                                                                                        
                 
                   
I admired Hopper’s ability to take the so-called ugly and lonely aspects of modern life and give them a poetic, magical and eerie beauty. Strangely, he reminded me of a twentieth century Vermeer. His paintings had a brooding melancholy that was hard to pin down. They were dramatic moments of life caught in mid scene - before or after - something sinister had happened. His brushwork was neither flashy nor falsely brilliant - rather it was understated and evocative - a kind of fuzzy cinematic Impressionism. Like all truly great art, it looked deceptively easy, yet comparison with his peers proved that Hopper could conjure poetic images that they could only dream of creating. All his contemporaries came out of this show in my mind as provincial also-rans. In the bookshop, I bought Modern Life. Edward Hopper and His Time, an excellently accessible guide to the exhibition.                                   
                     
Looking around the rest of the Whitney we saw Ed Kienholz’s life-size assemblage The Wait from 1962-64 - a spooky domestic scene with a elderly female figure sitting on a chair in a living room interior with photographs of family including one of a young man in army uniform on a table by her side. Perhaps she was awaiting the return of her son from war. In a birdcage beside her, there was a beautiful, live gray Parakeet - that was cleaning its feathers. I did not want to frighten the bird so I stayed at a distance from the lovely bird that seemed oblivious to its importance to the artwork. Yet again, I was viscerally impressed by Kienholz’s ability to bring fetishistic magic to found objects.                                        

We also saw Shadow a new video piece by Slater Bradley in collaboration with cinematographer Ed Lachman that was a kind of prologue to Dark Blood an unfinished Hollywood film from 1993 that was not completed because its charismatic star River Phoenix had died of a drugs overdose outside the Viper Room. We were all entranced by this beautifully shot and atmospheric video piece - and spent some time watching it.                                                                       
                                   
                 
Later Jeff dropped us off at the Neue Galerie, where I was hoping to see an exhibition of Franz Xavier Messerschmitt’s ‘Character Heads’. However when we arrived we discovered that we had missed the Franz Xavier Messerschmitt exhibition by two weeks! In the lobby by the bookshop, there was a replica of one of his heads for $650, I would have loved to own it, though Carol thought it would give her nightmares. However, she bought me the poster to the exhibition as well as four postcards of his Character Heads.                                                                                                                                                
Sadly, the 3ed floor of the Neue Galerie was closed. However, one floor of the museum was open.  The first room contained largish oil paintings by Klimt and Schiele as well as Viennese clocks and furniture. On view was Gustav Klimt’s painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907, which had been bought in 2006 for $137 million, making it at the time the most expensive painting in the world. Was it worth it? Well many less laboured and original works had sold for similar prices. Is any painting worth the kind of money that would save the lives of many a starving African nation? Of course not, in an ideal world, but art continued to be part of the treasure and booty of the world that retained its unique value even in an apocalypse. Did such a price tag inevitably sully any genuine aesthetic appreciation? Of course it did, and personally I ignored it and tried to appreciate it as it had been intended by its maker not his collectors. Looking at this modern Byzantine expression of luxury and neurosis - I felt dazed. As my eyes scanned the dense symbolic freeze of golden and sliver eyes, swirls and lozenges that almost encased Adele Bloch-Bauer in a Midas like nightmare of privilege - I nearly swooned.                                                                    
The Klimt was flanked by two marble sculptures by George Minne of kneeling male youths, which I had seen in reproduction before but not paid much attention to. In the flesh, though they were very sensual and moving.                                                                                                                 

There were also several oil paintings by Schiele. A town painting by Schiele surprised me with its topsy-turvy stacks of houses drawn out in ultramarine blue and filled in with bright colours – I saw for the first time that there were people in some of his town paintings - which I had previously presumed - were always devoid of inhabitants.                                                                               
                     
The second room contained watercolours and drawings by Schiele, pencil drawings by Klimt, watercolours and drawings by Kokoschka and drawings by Alfred Kubin. Looking at Schiele’s drawings made when he was in his early twenties left me speechless with wonder. I felt a gush of reality hit me - as I realized how far off his brilliance I was as a teenager and how stupid I had been to think I could ever match him. I could think of few artists in history who had such an original and startling facility. I laughed at my teenage self for ever thinking I had a hope in hell of competing with Schiele as a draughtsman. Klimt’s drawings in comparison were beautiful but rather insubstantial and sketchy. I liked the Kokoschka’s but not as much as I might have wished. Yet I could see how Schiele in Kokoschka’s words had “stolen” his brittle line and subject of emaciated teenagers – but he had done so to far great effect and with more imagination and skill.                                                                                  
                     
Looking at these Expressionist works, I became conscious of the mindset such work demanded compared to conventional art. The commercial glitz of Pop, the vain posturing of conceptual installation and the nutty obsessions of Folk art fitted well into the fast paced meanderings of a tourist with a lot to see and little time to see it. However, Expressionism I felt was different. You could not just say hello to an Expressionist and gossip and joke – you were dragged into a heart to heart whether you liked it or not. So we went around the two open rooms a second time to make the most of what was on view.   

Before we left, we decided to have something to eat. We went into the ground floor cafe, but I got scared it might be too expensive and we decided to go down stairs to the cheaper cafe. Carol, forgot her shopping bag and just as I spotted this, I noticed the actor Eliot Gould who was sitting near us pointing it out to us. We went downstairs to the basement cafe and quickly had Mocha’s and chocolate cakes. Jeff collected us in his car and brought us on a drive around Manhattan taking in Greenwich Village, Tribeca, Chelsea, the Meatpacking district and 5th Avenue introducing us to many sights we would have missed had we not had his local expertise. Then we headed back to New Jersey.                           

On Friday, we spent the day in the Westfield Mall in New Jersey. Carol bought more toys in the Hello Kitty store, jewellery in Hot Topic and clothes in Torrent. I bought two t-shirts in the Affliction store, chinos and socks in Banana Republic and American Painter magazines and a moleskin sketchbook in Borders bookshop. Overall, the standard of service in America was superb, I had been in so many countries were staff acted as if they were doing me a favour by serving me. In America, staff were friendly and helpful without being obsequious. We had lunch in Wendys, I loved their burgers but hated their fries made with potato skins still on - though Carol preferred them to regular fries.                                  
                                     
In the AMC cinema in Westfield Mall, we watched The Fighter staring Mark Walberg and Christian Bale. It told the story of ‘Irish Mickey Ward’ who became famous for his trilogy of fights against Arturo Gatti. Ward narrowly won Gatti v Ward I, a barnburner of a fight that was awarded fight of the year by Ring Magazine. Ward lost the following two bouts but the third - was again named fight of the year by Ring magazine. Funny, heartbreaking and thrilling The Fighter was by far the best boxing movie I had seen since Raging Bull. Even Carol, who had no great love for boxing found it enthralling, largely because its main subject was Irish Mickey Ward’s chaotic family life and troubled relationship with his Crack addicted brother.                                                                                                                      
                
When we got back to the hotel, we read our art books and then I watched Aurturo Gatti v Ivan Robinson II from Atlantic City in December 1998 on ESPN Classics. It was a terrific fight. It went all ten rounds, Gatti lost by one point which he had lost due to a low blow. Round three was an unbelievable war that Gatti won - but Robinson out boxed him in the later rounds.                       
                               
On Saturday, Jeff drove us into Soho. I had arranged to meet up with an artist friend of mine Paul Behnke from MySpace on Canal Street. Before we met with him, Carol and I strolled around the galleries, boutiques and bookshops in SoHo like the beautiful Anna Sui boutique and Taschen bookshop. Then we looked around The Arcadia Gallery, which specialized in bloodless 19th century pastiche, by painters living in a time warp. Their technique was impressive, but it was substanceless. It reminded me of a higher quality Oisín gallery kind of art. In the Arcadia Gallery, I was foolishly impressed by the slick technique of the neo-academic painter Jeremy Lipking. I bought catalogues on Jeremy Lipking and Francis Livingston - but later I felt like a man who had just been duped by conmen.                                                

Then we met up with Paul and went into Pearl Paint on Canal Street – where I imagined the likes of Warhol, Schnabel and Basquiat buying their supplies. This three-story ramshackle art store was far more evocative than the Pearl Paint warehouse we had visited in Paramus. The staff were old, eccentric types who knew their subject. I bought some Sennelier oil paint that I needed to make some minor retouching to Archway in St. Anne’s, 2006, which Jeff had bought from me and had been damaged by the framer. We then ducked out to a local cafe and had coffee and cakes.                                                         

We all took the subway up to Chelsea where we met up with James Erikson another painter friend of Paul’s. We followed them around the galleries of Chelsea. Had it not been for Paul and James, we would never have found our way around so many high-end art galleries and we were so grateful to them for their guidance. Chelsea had been the centre of the New York contemporary art world for over twenty years. Apart from art galleries, and a few fancy restaurants - there seemed to be nothing else but car repair shops.                                                                                                                          
         
In one of the first galleries, we saw Suckadelic, an installation of sci-fi action figures with big dicks and obscene text in a room graffitied with vulgar words. At the entrance to the gallery there was a pink Storm Trooper from Star Wars collapsed on the floor and surround by beer bottles and dollar bills - other ‘masterpieces’ featured Boba Fett crucified  in a shrine with rosary beads draped over him. Carol loved it! I loathed it intensely, it was frankly the most juvenile, amateurish, stupid and desperate to shock exhibition I had seen in thirty years. However, despite sticking its middle figure up to everyone – all the works were for sale.                                                                                                                              
                  
In the Heidi Chow Gallery we saw abstract paintings by Steven Alexander and Taro Suzuki which were pleasant wall fillers. In the Pavel Zoubok Gallery we saw goofy assemblages and collages by Barton Lidice Benes that Carol loved but I was indifferent to. In the Luise Ross Gallery we saw some promising dreamlike paintings by Marzie Nejad.                                                                                                            
In the Pace Gallery we saw 52 Variables - new neo-Pop paintings by Keith Tyson of large playing cards depicting a variety of corporate logos, low-brow icons and High Art masterpieces. They were mixed media on aluminium. Each image was rectangular with a curved white frame around them to mimic the boundary of a playing card. The images were highly polished and meticulous as well as knowingly Post-Modern. I admired them without loving them. There was little in them that had not been said already by better artists in the 1960s and late 1980s. Still I bought the catalogue to the exhibition, which came in the form of a deck of playing cards with intellectual quotes on the back of each. I asked the beautiful but highly groomed receptionist, “is this the same Keith Tyson that won the Turner Prize for installations?” “Yes.” She replied abruptly. “Did he paint all these himself?” I asked incredulously. “Yes!” She abruptly replied. I did not believe a word of it.                            

                                                                        
In the Gagosian Gallery we saw new work by Ellen Gallagher, which Carol and I were blown away by. Greasy was Gallerger’s first solo exhibition in New York for six years and continued her exploration of African-American culture, natural-history, marine life and the personalizing of Minimalist grammar. Although there were some very large collaged canvases, again I found her strongest works to be the smaller pieces. Though a beautiful show, it lacked the bite of her earlier works.            
                           
In the Luhring Augustine gallery, I liked Tulsa an early black and white film by the photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark who had caused a scandal with his later Kids film. At the Lehmann Maupin gallery, we saw Law of the Jungle a group exhibition of art works curated by Tiago Carnerio da Cunha. There were some terrific paintings and sculptures in the exhibition, but my favourite was a visceral 3D oil painting Cannibal Landscape by Adriane Varejao.                                                                        

                  
In the Robert Miller Gallery, we saw a museum quality Lee Krasner exhibition of Abstract-Expressionist paintings. In the male dominated art world of the 1940s, Krasner had been over shadowed by her husband Jackson Pollock. Yet, she had been crucial to his development as a painter as well as his success - which she had networked due to his anti-social nature. It was only late in life that the strength of her work had been acknowledged. My favourite paintings were a series of orange and purple canvases from 1963 that Krasner had painted at night due to insomnia – they had intensely worked surfaces often manipulated with her hands and fingers. I loved the exhibition and found the works full of psychological meaning and intense, hard won feeling. 

                                                                                                           
In the Mary Boone Gallery, we saw new watercolour/gypsum paintings by Joe Zucker. They reminded me of pretentious Post-Modern mosaics - or lifeless, neo-academic exaggerations of a small fragment of Paul Klee’s wonderful oeuvre. “What do you think of them?” Carol asked me. “Their fucking crap!” I exclaimed and heard a grunt of disgust from the offices. However, all I could think was how in the 1980s Mary Boone had shown the likes of Schnabel, Salle, Basquiat and Fischl and now they were reduced to this kind of smart arsed academia. In fact, like most of the galleries, I was more impressed by the floor to ceiling bookshelves crammed with catalogues than by the art on offer.                               
        
In the Stephen Haller Gallery, we saw From the Moment Passed a series of oil and mixed media paintings by Linda Stojak. In a way, her figurative show of paintings of women in dresses typified everything that I hated about most of the art in Chelsea. These largish paintings were clever, schooled and claimed feeling – but all I saw in them was an art-school project writ large in different colours by a talented but uninspired pupil. They were appealingly painted, they suggested feminist issues and there was nothing off-putting about them - so they would look good over anyone’s chase long on the upper west side - but that was about it. There was nothing about them - that suggested the ugly and vulgar pressure of real creative risk taking.                                                                                                                
 
In another of the Pace galleries we saw new paintings and some older drawings by Brice Marden.  Looking at the Marden’s in the Pace Gallery, I wondered at his ‘success’. A cult minimalist in the 1970s with his encaustic coloured panels - which I had briefly loved when I had studied them intently in Amsterdam in 1992. In the late 1990s he had changed towards a looping abstraction that was reminiscent of Asian calligraphy or Middle Eastern arabesques - filtered through Pollock’s legacy. In this show, his ‘radical’ departure was to add a gray border to the sides – it struck me as a pointless negation. Not that my opinion matter a dam - he had exhibited worldwide, been praised by critics and writers I adored and made a small fortune for himself.                                                                             
                               
At the Fredericks & Freiser Gallery we saw Images from a Floating World: 19th Century Japanese Erotic Prints and the Echo in Modern and Contemporary Art. Apart from the discreet Japanese prints - in which coitus was only a small detail in elaborate and beautiful prints of domestic life - there were works of varied quality by Matisse, Carol Dunham, John Wesley, Lisa Yuskavage, Pipilotti Rist and Tracey Emin. It was one of the most boring exhibitions of erotic art I had ever seen – so I suppose that meant in contemporary art terms it was brilliant! Even Matisse’s efforts looked fey and unconvincing. It really must have taken quite a lot of artistic skill and curatorial editing to turn the uncontrollable and dangerous sex-drive into a tranquilizer. Surrounded by a room of damp firecrackers, I imagined my work going off like a pound of Semtex - and once again realized how far off the planet I was.                                                          

In Chelsea, I must have seen three mono-print drawings, two neon works and one stitched drawing on fabric by Tracey Emin. Not one of them struck me as a major work of art. They had fizz but no bite. In fact, they appeared utterly facile exercises in self-deception and self-promotion and hardly worth a second glance.                                                                                                                            
  
Finally, in the Sean Kelly Gallery we saw a collaborative installation of watercolours by Callum Innes and writing by Colm Toibin influenced by Innes work. Individually, I thought little of the Callum Innes watercolours. They were meticulous and well crafted but so was virtually everything in Chelsea. However, the installation, with the room painted an eggshell gray, with Innes watercolours hung high and low about the room with Colm Toibin’s text Water/Colour the story of a grieving widow and the colours of the Irish coast printed alongside in floating sentences really was beautiful and entrancing. I happily stayed chatting with the others in the installation for half an hour - slowing enjoying the trance like experience of the installation.                                                                                                                

I enjoyed going around so many galleries I knew of - because of their adverts in Artforum - but I felt all my illusions about contemporary art in New York crumble away. Living in a backwater like Dublin, one could over-estimate the brilliance of contemporary art in metropolises like New York - yet many of the works I saw in Chelsea were no better than that of the star pupils in an NCAD graduation show. Much of the contemporary work I saw Chelsea broke my heart with its soullessness, simplistic professionalism, blatant commercialism, gimmicky ideas and production line look. The art market is about the in-crowd, celebrity and product so I felt my art that battled with inner demons, pathology and unanswerable existential dilemmas had no place in this world of commerce. I saw little that would change the world or the way we see it - it was just expensive interior decoration. A surprisingly large amount of the gallery work was predictable abstract paintings and novelty sculptures. In fact, I saw so much unoriginal and pleasantly unambitious abstract painting – that my respect for the genre plummeted. I saw virtually no self-portraits, nudes or political works never mind works critical of the art market. In fact, I saw virtually nothing in over 30 swanky galleries that related to my art in any way. I felt some empathy for Lee Krasner’s work from the 1950s-60s and admiration for Ellen Gallagher but saw nothing by a man that spoke to me.                                                                                                                    
             
On Sunday, Jeff drove us into Manhattan and we spent the day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It would be one of the loveliest days Carol and I had ever had. I had been looking forward to seeing the Met, but Carol who much preferred contemporary art had thought she would find it boring. However, there was such a variety of art on display that every possible artistic interest was catered for in the Met. It also was also graced by some of the most heartbreaking beautiful Jewish and African American arty girls I had ever seen.                                                                                                         

We started on the ground floor and the Greek and Roman section. I am not a sculptor, I have only ever made a couple of crass sculptures and a handful of throwaway 3D art works, yet I have always loved Greek and Roman sculpture and would rate their work at the very top of human creative achievement. Since my teenage years, I have drawn from sculptures many times, so I took many photographs of the sculptures on view, thinking I might do so again.                                                  

We also saw a Roman mosaic from about 300 A.D. that had been recently uncovered in Israel - and was on loan Israel Antiquities Authority and Shelby White and Leon Levy Lod Mosaic Centre. It depicted exotic animals, fish and ships and was in remarkably good condition. It had a beauty and complexity that was beyond most artists today especially the likes of Joe Zucker.                            
        

Then we moved on to the Oceanic and African tribal art rooms. The art of Oceania was another revelation to me, since I was more familiar with African Tribal art. Carol adored these works, as did I. They had a primitive magic and intense power that was hard to deny. Carol said some of the masks looked like cartoon characters which was true. We both would have loved to have time to sketch in the museum but sadly, we didn’t. There was such a variety of art to see in the Met that we could only get a taste of its treasures. Looking at the Rocco pink and gold porcelain, I joked to Carol that my mum would have loved them.                                                                                      
                                               


Then we came across a collection of twentieth century masterpieces including work by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine, Beckmann, Klee, Balthus, Dubuffet and Giacometti. Some of my favourite paintings in the whole Met were by Modigliani, I admired his ability to reinvent the nude and portrait in a way that preserved a love of beauty and character. I found it bizarre that a man that had been such a tortured brute at times - could produce such serenely beautiful, romantic canvases. Looking at the mass produced canvases that Modi used and were now hung in ornate frames - I wished I could see them stripped of their frames - as they had been after he created them. I marvelled at Modi’s elegant line and sparing use of paint. Of course, he was not as avant-garde as a host of minor artists of the day never mind the likes of Matisse, Picasso and Duchamp but he had produced soulful works that needed no manifestos or academic theorizing.                                               
                                                 
     
I was surprised by how much I loved the Paul Klee works I saw. They were so humble, yet perfectly crafted and poetic. Miró’s painting The Farm, from 1921-2 was a revelation to me. I had mostly seen Miró’s later and far more simplistic paintings, so to see this complex work - which Miró had spent two years painting - changed my understanding of his early work and how it had provided the intensive foundation for his later symbolic simplifications.                              


                                                               
The 20th Century realism of Balthus, was the most credible I had ever seen, despite the fact that he looked back to Courbet his work managed to be both traditional and modern which I think is one of the hardest things of all to do. Balthus’ technique was traditional but the psychological mood was Freudian.                                                                                                                           
               
The soundness of Dubuffet’s paintings surprised me, despite the fact that he mixed his oil paints with chancy materials like sand, plaster and tar. In fact, his paintings were in far better condition than many of the Belle Epoch painters who came only a few decades before him.                    
               

Some art I ignored not because it was bad, but because I was already familiar with it. I did not bother with Cézanne or much of Degas or Cubist Picasso. On the other and I liked looking at Braque’s later Cubist works and even Renoir whose best work I had seen far too few of in the flesh. Renoir impressed me with his sugary skills at flattering rosy checked children, plump naked women and society women at play. Nothing dark or sinister ever happened in a Renoir yet his fiction of idyllic bourgeois life seemed as real as any other. However, as a painter I found his art a frivolous cul-de-sac. Manet on the other hand impressed me canvas after canvas with his radically modern approach to painting. His mix of skill, intellect and character, which never descended into academicism, empty virtuosity or trivial picture making – could make even a simple flower in a small glass vase seem like a radical poem in paint.                        

Some of Picasso’s late paintings from the 1930s shocked me with their haste and crudeness which was barely saved by his unfailing design and power of line. However, seeing his early paintings from the Blue Period restored my wonder with their slow detonation of sorrow in a build up of blues. Looking at his Portrait of Gertrude Stein I could understand why it had taken repeated sittings over several months to complete. In it, one could witness his attempt to conquer the legacy of Ingres yet at the same time move towards the monumentality of Iberian sculpture, while at the same time capturing the formidable character of Ms. Stein.                                                                                                          

Picasso was famous for painting over 10,000 canvases, his productivity was a thing of legend. However seeing his canvases in a kind of giant historical group show like the Met, I wondered how many of his individual works were truly irreplaceable masterpieces? If the Met was on fire, and I could only save a few dozen paintings, I personally would not have chosen a single Picasso. After all even confining his efforts to the twentieth century, did Picasso ever paint a nude as sexy as a Modigliani, a landscape as powerful as a Chaïm Soutine, a portrait as good as a Balthus or a group scene as good as a Beckmann?              

Some art works disappointed me, like the late religious Dalí paintings. Yes, they were skilfully painted and technically complex, but they lacked the mystery and magic of the old masters like Vermeer and there was something fundamentally off about them. A collection of huge prints by Howard Hodgkin I found far more satisfying.                                       
                                                                      
After taking in the modern art on the ground floor, we decided to take a break for lunch. We went downstairs to the cafeteria and had coffees and cake. The Met had a lovely atmosphere - celebratory and welcoming. The staff were friendly and helpful despite the crowds. I was delighted that the Met was so large that one never felt hemmed in by other visitors. The crowd included families, couples, art lovers, and students but thankfully not throngs of crass tourist groups ramming their way through galleries snapping photographs like in the Louvre. The people were laid back and clearly in love with art. The children were adorable and wonderfully well behaved. The bookstore was like a department store, a wonderland of books, posters, t-shirts, and nick-knacks. In the Met bookshop, I bought the museum catalogue, a book on Franz Kline by Harry F. Gaugh and a couple of Met t-shirts.                                                 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was quite simply the greatest and most varied collection of art I had ever seen in a single museum. It would be easier for me to list the things we did not see than the art we did. I felt dramatically humbled but also immensely inspired. In the past, when young I would have found excuses and critiques that would have formed a barrier between masterpieces and me. However, fast approaching forty I felt no need to protect my ego. Just as the universe was vaster than anything I could imagine, so art was full of countless masterpieces I could only humbly acknowledge or foolishly derided out of childish petulance. At times looking at the old and modern masters, I wanted to give up – yet at other times, I felt inspired to try harder.                                                                                  
     
After lunch and ducking outside for a cigarette, we headed upstairs and looked around the drawing section, which included stunning works by Schiele, Seurat, Rembrandt and countless others as well as some early photographs. We saw some beautiful Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings including works by Renoir, Bonnard, Vuillard, Van Dongen and a late airy Balthus nude interior. In the Met we saw some of the most charming and skilful depictions of children - who are notoriously difficult to paint. In many Renaissance paintings, one can see how difficult they initially were to capture - by the doll-like or midget like way many artists resulted in making them look. However, by the nineteenth century artists like Renoir were masters at making them look fully alive and believable.                             

We strolled around the late Gothic rooms seeing powerful works by Memling and Cranach. Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Harvesters 1565, was a revelation to me, it was so succinct, so well drawn, and composed. Lacking the artifice and mannerism of Italian Renaissance art, it was startlingly modern in its realism. Then we had a look around the late Italian Renaissance masters like Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto whose broad and broken brushwork was shockingly modern in its expressiveness.                                                                                           
                                          
In the Dutch rooms, Rembrandt stood out as a painterly magician in a world of coloured drawings. His paintwork was always inventive, unexpected and stupendous. I felt like a deluded, crazy provincial in the Met whose eyes had suddenly opened to the gap between my minor league efforts and the A league game. The work ethic of the masters was stunning. No wonder so few artists wrote. They simply had no time. They must have worked morning, noon and night at their craft.                         
               
An unfinished painting by Jean Baptiste Greuze Aegina Visited by Jupiter 1767-69, was a wonder to me. I was thrilled to see its unfinished state, which revealed how even in the first layer of paint Greuze was expertly and passionately drawing, shading and colouring the canvas.                  
                      
Ingres portraits had me transfixed. The immaculate perfection of his technique and grandeur of his idealism was hypnotic. A lot of rubbish had been said about Ingres. I remember Shane Cullen who had seen a retrospective of his work saying, “They’re not that good you know. You could do them!” It was a ludicrous dismissal of Ingres and an empty attempt at flattery of me that even at the time left me speechless. Academicism was usually a source of ridicule for me, it had produced so much lifeless and pompous art but Ingres was an exception, partly because of the perversity and complexity of his vision - which was married to draughtsmanship of stupendous quality.                
                                             
Wandering around the French galleries we came across Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg (née Marie-Louise-Charlotte-Gabrielle Thomas de Pange, 1816–1850), 1841 a dreamlike portrait of a lady with a long face by Théodore Chassériau painted by the amazing prodigy at the age of twenty-two. It was a terrific and superbly crafted painting worthy of a mature painter - but all the more impressive from one so young.      
Courbet’s nudes were also stunning. The myth of Courbet as an egotistical revolutionary and proto-typical modern artist obscured the tremendous quality of his talent which was meatier than most but skilful beyond the dreams of most young tyros.                          
                                                          
We had a look around the 19th century French academic art including works by Gerome whose technique stunned me, but his paintings soon faded from my memory like most of this academic work. I was surprised by the thinness of paint that most of these ancient painters used. How they began drawing and shading the figures with the very first layer - which they brushed into shape. Impasto like that later used by van Gogh and Georges Rouault looked crazy, crude and anti-social in such company.      

                 
At some point – perhaps with Delacroix a radical shift in the work ethic and intellectual attitude of Western artists occurred. Comparing the laboured and skilled work of Ingres with the looser and increasingly personalized work of Delacroix - I could see this change happening. The art market, which emerged in the late nineteenth century, created new demands on the artist. In place of a handful of traditional masterpieces of mind-blowing detail - one had to create dozens of novel, acceptably virtuoso works of skill - but far less concentrated attention. The masterpiece worked on for months at a time gave way with Impressionism to a quicker sketchier approach. Simultaneously the personality of the artist and their intellectual justifications increased in importance until one reached the likes of Franz Kline - rapid large-scale paintings with ego and attitude but little skill or labour.                                                                     


In the Gilded Age section of the Met, I liked Anders Leonard Zorn’s painting of Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon from 1897 and I was shocked by its rawness and hasty brushstrokes that seen close up approached Abstract Expressionism in their boldness. John Singer Sargent’s painting The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant from 1899 was huge (as big in size though not in scale as a Pollock) and shocking in its flashy brushwork yet stunning sense of tone and colour. I also lingered over Giovanni Boldini’s portrait of Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, and Her Son, Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill from 1906. “Does it remind you of you and your mum?” Carol asked. “Yes a bit”, I replied, “but I also love Boldini’s flashy style”.  
                                                                                    
With only an hour left, we came across yet another section this time dedicated to late Twentieth century art including work by Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Kline, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Kiefer, Baselitz, Rauschenberg, Chuck Close and Freud. Sadly, pushed for time, we had to hurry through these rooms.                                        
                                                                                      
Overall my favourite works in the Met were: the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, Rembrandt’s portraits, Ingres female portraits, Balthus’s Lolita’s, Courbet’s nudes, the African and Oceanic masks, Vermeer’s interiors, Modigliani’s nudes, Cranach’s nudes, Titian’s nudes, early Picasso, Chaïm Soutine’s portraits, Pollock’s  abstract canvases, a late self-portrait by Chuck Close and Freud’s painting of Leigh Bowery seen seated from behind. The day we spent in The Metropolitan Museum of Art was one of the best days of my life.                   
                                                                               
Miscalculating the time, we left the Met too early, so unfortunately we had to wait for fifteen minutes before Jeff arrived in his car. Standing outside in the bitter cold, we jumped around and held each other to keep warm from the cutting winter wind. I have never been so cold in my life. When Jeff arrived, we all drove back to the hotel.                    
                                                                        
Carol and I spent the night relaxing, watching television and flicking through our art books. Repeatedly, I had to tell Carol I could not believe my luck. I was sure my mother was up there somewhere looking out for me. My only regret was that she was not alive for me to tell her all I had seen and done in New York.                                                                                                                          

In the second week, Jeff brought us down to his hotel in Rockville, Maryland in the greater Washington D.C. area - where seventeen of my paintings hung in the lobby of the Best Western Plus Hotel & Suites. As we drove, Jeff gave us a potted history of the places we were passing. I had never visited a country where we had a friend to guide us and point out the places of interest - so it was great to have Jeff’s insights. We stopped off in Baltimore harbour for lunch in a Uno Pizza restaurant. The sky was crystal-clear and see could see an old ninetieth century warship in the harbour, a submarine and ramparts of an old fort.                           

                                                                                                         
When I saw my work in the Best Western Plus Hotel & Suites, I was speechless. Seeing my work so wonderfully installed, left me filled with gratitude. I was so touched and loved how my work looked in the lobby. I had worried my art would not look good enough. However, in their frames they looked great. It all seemed like a dream to me. Then we were brought up to our room and were stunned that they had given us a beautiful suite.       
                                                                                            
Washington was a much cleaner city than New York and the people seemed friendlier. Carol and I loved the Washington accent with its Southern lilt. We found American’s so friendly, helpful and welcoming. We met many people with Irish heritage and others who loved our accent. Everything in America was bigger and better. We began to joke that everything we saw was the biggest in the world. While in D.C. we took a bus trip around the city and spent an afternoon in the West and East wings of the National Gallery of Art Washington. We had no idea that there was so much art to see in Washington. We thought it was just a political town, but it had in fact over fifty museums covering everything from art and spying to space travel.                                                 
                                     
The National Gallery of Art of Washington D.C. was another mind-blowing collection of art works and like most of the museums in Washington D.C., it was free! We could have spent weeks studying the varied and superb collections of the National Gallery of Washington. We started in the West Wing, which was impressive with its vast modern spaces, natural light and fine collection of modern masters. Its ultra-modern rooms contained a stimulating collection of modern art including Honoré Daumier, Manet, Degas, Picasso, Schiele, Klimt, Dubuffet, Pollock, Franz Kline and Chuck Close. The highlights of the West Wing for me were small oil paintings by the Impressionists, paintings by Dubuffet, collages by Matisse, a Schiele self-portrait bronze and a Kirchner wooden female bust.                     
          
There was a room of huge paper collages on canvas by Matisse. I had seen these in reproduction countless times, but to see them for real was a revelation. They were joyful and inspiring works made by Matisse in old age when he could not leave his bed. Painted in gouache and cutout by Matisse they were then glued on canvas by his assistants - they still looked modern and relevant. Even Calder who I had never felt much about one way or another looked terrific when his mobiles were seen properly staged and lit in a museum. I loved the shadows his mobiles cast and their playfulness.                                                      

We came across two Kirchner oil paintings from his later life, which were great to see, but even for me somewhat disappointing. I found them unexpectedly crude and indecisive. They looked over-painted, under-designed and his brushwork as crude as mine at the age of nineteen. However, a wooden painted bust of a woman by Kirchner wowed me.                      
                                                                   
My esteem for Dubuffet was reinforced with each canvas I saw by him. There was so much artfulness, obsessive intensity and craft in his supposedly crude and artless works. Yes, Art Brut influenced them - but he gave it a new scale and tasteful knowingness, which gave it another meaning.       

One of the surprise highlights for me was a painting of cakes by Wayne Thiebaud from 1963. I was familiar with his work only in reproduction and had often liked it. However, in the flesh his delicious manipulation of thick paint was compellingly modern yet also respectful of the past. His pallet was also delicious with its aqua blues, candy pinks, luscious pastels, and rich maroons.                     
                   
The installation of Barnet Newman’s ‘Stations of The Cross’ a sequence of twelve striped down canvases also impressed me with its solemn minimalism and storytelling through just line and space. A room dedicated to minimal art about nothing including works by Joseph Kosuth, Robert Ryman and other forgettable ‘artists’ left me with nothing to say.                                         
                               
Finally, in the West Wing, we saw a wonderful collection of small Impressionist paintings from The Chester Dale Collection, which included gems by Corot, Honoré Daumier, Latour, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Toulouse-Lautrec.                                          
                                               
The older palatial East wing was even more wonderful, with its vast marble atriums and tastefully decorated galleries and comfortable couches. It held one of the finest collections of Old Masters I had ever seen as well as 19th century European and American art. We had little time so we had to be very selective. We saw works by Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and American great masterpieces by Sargent, Homer, Bellows and Wyeth.                       
                                                                    
With little time to spare, I was wilfully selective in what I looked at. I mostly allowed myself to be drawn to works from a distance. I found the drab, dry works of Eakins and Whistler disappointing and they did not encourage me to look more closely. Whistler I found to be a drab let-down, the only exception being his haunting The White Girl (Symphony in White), which drew us to it from across the room with its brightish pallet of whites, grays, sienna and subtle flesh tones.       
                                          
Sargent’s smaller canvases were impressive in their concise fireworks display of colour and brushwork. George Bellows was represented by a handful of larger six-footer canvases including another boxing picture, Both Members of This Club, which was far superior to a more cartoony looking version we had seen in the Whitney’s Edward Hopper and His Time exhibition.                          
                                       
In the National Gallery of Art, there were three Vermeer’s on view plus another - to my eyes - very dubiously attributed to him. I said to Carol, “that can’t be a Vermeer! If it is...  It’s Vermeer on a very bad day.” “Actually, they think now that this might be a Vermeer.” The guard who was standing nearby interjected. “There are only twenty-eight Vermeer’s in the world and we have eight.” He informed us. “Oh...” I replied not wanting to correct him that there was more like thirty-four Vermeer’s in the world. “Well I don’t think that’s a Vermeer, there’s no comparison between that and the other’s.” I replied - quickly moving away to look at the art. The delicious Girl with a Red Hat was on view – it was a luscious gem of a painting and I instantly fell in love with it. I marvelled at Vermeer’s masterful and minute brushstrokes that were at once precise and yet softly focused.                          
                                        
For me there were broadly two kinds of painterly brilliance. The minutely detailed kind that one found in Holbein, Vermeer or Ingres and the broad bravura virtuosity of Hals, Velázquez and Manet. Both were astonishing in different ways. When I was a teenager, I had been most impressed with the former, now as a middle-aged artist I preferred the later.                                           
                                  
The National Gallery of Art had a superb collection of portraits and self-portraits by Rembrandt that were unquestionably the highlights of the East Wing for me. I could agree with Max Lieberman when he said, “Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel the desire to paint; but when I see a Rembrandt, I want to give it up.” (Max Lieberman, quoted by Robert Wallace in The World of Rembrandt, Time-Life Books, 1969, P.69.) Rembrandt was a magician with brush and paint with a depth of humanity unparalleled in visual art. The way Rembrandt could put so much feeling and humanity into the faces of his sitters was incredible - but it was trumped if possible - by the painterly drama he could then bring to a golden chain, white ruff, a lace collar, the fall of a sleeve or the embroidery of a dress. Although Rembrandt always resolved his faces – his treatment of other clothing details could be almost Abstract-Expressionistic when seen up-close. In fact, in parts of the paintings the paint was so thin and sketchy that you could still see the tinted undercoat. I remembered how in an interview the year before Damien Hirst had said “anyone can be Rembrandt” and I fumed with incredulity at his arrogance, aesthetic stupidity and blindness. Many people still tried to copy Rembrandt’s style, usually their efforts were facile and kitsch in comparison – all flash and convoluted bravura pastiche - with none of his deep understanding of form or humanity. Even his pupils and assistants looked cartoonish in comparison.                                                                             

By 4:30pm, we were mentally and physically exhausted. We slumped in a couch in front of Ruben’s huge canvas Daniel in the Lions’ Den from 1612-13. Daniel sat forlorn, his hands in prayer, as he looked up to heaven for salvation - while surrounded by a pride of lions and the skulls and bones of previous victims. The lions were fantastically believable, though it looked like just one lion had provided the model for all the pride. The painting was ruined for me though by the utter unbelievablity of Ruben’s treatment of Daniel’s flesh – that looked airbrushed and over idealized. I was reminded again, of how many Ruben’s paintings I had seen which had similarly annoyed me with their systematic play of warm and cool flesh tones - that resulted in perhaps the most unrealistic flesh by any Old Master.               
                    
The bookshop in the National Gallery was huge but it lacked a great collection of artist’s monographs - so I just bought the guide to the National Gallery of Art as well as a small book of works from The Chester Dale Collection in the museum.                                         
                                          
That evening we went back to the hotel and met up with Jeff who then took us out for dinner in Rockville. The following day we drove back up to New Jersey.                                                        


                
Friday 28th January was our last day in America and Jeff brought us into Manhattan for a final trip around before our flight. He brought us into Central Park that was knee deep in snow. We walked to the Bethesda Fountain and then had lunch at the Loeb Boathouse. Later Jeff showed us were Strawberry Fields the memorial to John Lennon was - but it was covered in snow so we could not see much. Going across the road we saw the Dakota building were John Lennon had lived and been shot outside in 1980. Then Jeff dropped us off in Time Square where Carol rapturously bought toys in the Disney Store. Finally, Jeff dropped us outside Pearl Paint on Canal Street and with the last of my money I bought more Lascaux and M. Graham & Co. Acrylics, coloured pencils and aids like a battery operated pencil sharpener, a brush-cleaning jar and a ceramic watercolour pallet.                                                                  
                        
Jeff dropped us off at the airport and we all hugged tearfully. In the airport, while waiting for our flight, I had a spiked milkshake with Baileys and Carol had a Red Velvet cake in the Garden State Diner. On the flight back to Dublin, I watched The Social Network, the story of Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook. Its story of the socially illiterate programmer made multi-billionaire was somewhat predictable, but saved by its stylish look and somewhat engaging acting. I did not mind the length of the flight, but I hated being crammed in a tiny seat like a sardine for seven hours.                                
                             
It had been quite simply the best holiday I had ever had. Carol and I had a wonderful time together because she was as addicted to art as I was and I was so happy that I could give my dearest Carol some treats. Still it was great to be back in Dublin and home safe and sound with all my pets. I had loved all the art in New York and enjoying meeting so many nice people, but I had missed the humble scale and greenery of Dublin.